The next few days will be decisive in determining whether the unprecedented summit which took place on Wednesday August 30 between Emmanuel Macron and the party leaders in Saint-Denis (Seine-Saint-Denis) will be really useful to the country. The way in which the summary of exchanges and working chapters proposed by the Head of State will be received and amended will tell whether a real movement has begun. Otherwise, the night of August 30 will have been nothing but a flash in the pan, beyond the performance achieved by the host of the Elysée Palace: holding out for twelve hours, behind closed doors, a political representation usually prone to tussle.
Against a background of consensus around support for Ukraine, the announcement of a “social conference” on low wages appears to be the most serious track, alongside lively debates around the evolution of institutions and the use of the referendum. But everything remains to be co-constructed, which makes the exercise both random and interesting. If something ends up emerging, it will not be the result of a vertical will alone but the result of a consensus in which the parties have, for the first time in a long time, an active role to play.
It is a great paradox to see a President of the Republic who has slain political parties and despised “the old world” finally reaching out to their leaders. The reversal is so sudden, so spectacular, that it legitimizes the suspicion shown by the oppositions of left and right. They fear being caught in the trap of a presidential maneuver aimed at breathing new life into a second term that got off to a bad start. The fact is, however, that no participant slammed the door. All those who were invited, including the most radical, felt that they had more to lose in the eyes of the French by boycotting the meeting than by debating behind closed doors serious subjects which refer them all to the scale of the crisis. democratic.
The weakness of the parties is not the result of the election of Emmanuel Macron. It precedes it and participates in the atrophy of the democratic exercise. Over the years, the number of militants has dwindled to a trickle; debates structured in currents no longer exist. Only the will of the leader takes precedence, when it still exists: Jean-Luc Mélenchon on the left, Marine Le Pen on the far right, Emmanuel Macron in the center. The loss of the absolute majority in the National Assembly in June 2022 was, in this regard, a powerful indicator. For the past fifteen months, it has been the parliamentary groups and not the parties that have set the “the” of political debate. Against a background of rising radicalism, the rat race prevails over the substantive debate, at the risk of further increasing citizen disengagement.
It is certainly an illusion to believe that the parties will regain their vitality overnight. But they would be wrong to neglect the rare occasions when, for good or bad reasons, a helping hand is reached out to them. If the “Saint-Denis meetings” can be of any use, it is to put their leaders back in the game a little, at a time when many are inclined, for convenience, to defend the call for a referendum on almost all subjects. If they still want to count, it is up to them to turn to their members, to put forward proposals, to structure them, to defend them before public opinion, then to seek ways to have them adopted. This is simply called nurturing democracy.
